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Eventbrite is proving that there is a market for online event planning for small and medium sized events such as yoga classes, fundraisers and music performances. The company told Forbes that in the first quarter of 2010, it saw $40.9 million in gross ticket sales, up 113% from the same period last year.

That puts the run rate for 2010 gross ticket sales at more than $160 million. Last year, the company did about $100 million in gross ticket sales. And in terms of numbers of tickets sold, Eventbrite has already sold 2 million tickets this year alone.

While a large company like Ticketmaster dominates the upper end of the events spectrum -- rock concerts and sports games -- Eventbrite has found that there is a business in helping smaller events plan, promote and sell tickets.

"It's about the live experiences," says Kevin Hartz, Eventbrite's chief executive. "That's where musicians and artists make their money now, and it applies to other areas now too -- physical fitness, sports and technology events, for instance."

Up till now, Eventbrite has focused on expanding its market across different types of events. Recently, it has also started to focus on serving larger events. Hartz says the company has already helped several events with an attendance between 15 and 20 thousand people. Continued growth could put the company on the path to competing with Ticketmaster. (Of note, Ticketmaster's former chief executive, Sean Moriarty, joined Eventbrite's board of directors in January.)

While Hartz doesn't see that happening any time soon, he thinks the company's grass roots approach will help it continue to snag both more and larger events. He sees Eventbrite akin to a company like Salesforce, which started small, but quickly grew to become a publicly traded company.

Social media has also played a large role in the growth of the company, according to Hartz. After Google, Facebook and Twitter are the second and third biggest drivers of traffic to Eventbrite, respectively. In a recent series of 10 live shows by comedian Dave Chappelle, the company says that 8% of ticket sales were the result of people sharing the event via Facebook and Twitter.

Eventbrite makes money by taking a small percentage of sales from paid-admission events, while offering the service at no cost to free-admission events. The company was originally founded and bootstrapped by husband-and-wife team Kevin and Julia Hartz at the end of 2006. It has since gotten nearly $10 million in funding, and is backed by firms like Sequoia Capital, whose partner Roelof Botha is also on the company's board of directors. Most recently, Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman became an advisor to the company last week.